Spell of the Urubamba

This new book focuses on the Urubamba Valley of Peru, which spans 4000 meters of altitude mostly in the Department of Cusco. More than one million visitors a year come to the Urubamba, especially to experience Machu Picchu, which overlooks the valley floor. The book, based on over 50 years of research and field work, represents an impressive accumulation of regional knowledge and testifies to how a long scholarly commitment can lead to a deep understanding of place, that probes the present and past, human and non-human, common and uncommon.

Auteur

For more than 50 years and on four continents, Daniel W. Gade (b. 1936) has carried out research in cultural-historical geography. Regionally, his investigations have focused especially on the Central Andes on which he published two previous books and 50 peer-reviewed articles. In all of his studies, in South America and elsewhere, the author has integrated space, time, culture and ecology in order to elucidate the multiple dimensions of place. Taken together, his scholarly work manifests a keen intellectual curiosity, phenomenological imagination, polymathic exploration and self-reflexivity. Over the decades support for his fieldwork has come from the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, the Comité Conjunto España-Estados Unidos, the Social Science Research Council, several research Fulbright awards and the University of Vermont. Professor Emeritus Daniel Gade, taught geography at the University of Vermont for 33 years. At various times during that period he was also a research fellow in Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and Cornell University and received residential grants from the John Carter Brown Library in Providence and the Camargo Foundation in France.

Résumé
This work examines the valley of the Urubamba River in terms of vertical zonation, Incan impact on the environment, plant use, the history of exploration and the notion of discovery, the idea of land reform, and cultural contact with the European world. Winding its path northward from the Andean Highlands to the Amazon, the valley has served as the stage of pre-Columbian civilizations and focal point of Spanish conquest in Peru.
"Gade left behind not only a superb body of scholarly work, but a network of colleagues and students who remain indebted to his example. This book should serve as an inspiration for all scholars who wish to pursue the Sauerian, counter enlightenment or post development agendas of understanding and respecting particular places in all their historical and cultural complexity, including ambiguities and contradictions." -- The Geographical Review, American Geographical Society

Contenu

Preface.- The Urubamba Valley in Panoptic Perspective.- Urubamba Travelers as Generators of Knowledge.- Urubamba Verticality: Reflections on Crops and Diseases.- The Sacred Valley as a Zone of Productivity, Privilege and Power.- Vilca in Andean Culture History: Psychotropic Associations in Urubamba and Beyond.- Mysterious Ucumari: The Andean Bear in Nature and Culture.- Urubamba Ramble: Hiram Bingham's Artful Encounter with Machu Picchu.- Vilcabamba: Fabled Redoubt of the Urubamba Region.- Highland and Lowland Peoples in Contact in the Tropical Urubamba.- Conclusion: The Spell is Cast.- Notes.- Glossary.- Index.